Tales of a Designer

Exploring Coudal.com

Coudal is one of my favorite sites to go to on the daily just to poke around, and I always feel like I learn something new about them when I go to the site. If you haven’t had a chance to visit the site, give it a try, but be patient, because who they are isn’t so obvious at first glance.

The first time I went to the site, I was way too confused about what was going on, so I left. Somehow I ended up stumbling across the site again, and decided to poke around for awhile. It took some time getting used to the site, but I grew to love it. It’s one of those sites that you really have to explore to find out what they’re about.

You are always bound to find something cool there, whether it’s a link to another site, or just some other random information that you never thought that you would learn.

A few weeks ago, in an Infrequent Mailing, they mentioned how they got an email from an angry reader demanding to “know what the hell the site was about?” The answer that they gave was:

The site is about British novelist Zadie Smith reading Frank O’Hara’s poem Animals into our answering machine. It’s about Steve driving from Iowa listening to nothing but Dancing Queen. It’s about Abelardo Morell turning hotel rooms into pinhole cameras. It’s about the Dane drinking tea and the owner of the yellow house smoking Dunhills. It’s about the rules of cricket, a cartoon Sasquatch, counting to three, crashing airliners full of dummies and breaking all the commandments before breakfast. Or maybe it’s about a guy named Stanley, a building by Mies, a chalkboard in the washroom or a museum full of museums.

It sounds ridiculous right? Well it made sense to me, but that’s because I’m used to the site. So give it a try if you haven’t already, it’s interesting, and you might like it! It’s now on my daily “sites to visit” list.